International AffairsThe telephone rang in the office of the university president. It was as if an explosive device had been discovered on the campus premises and needed to be disarmed.
This was March 2006, and the billionaire donor at the other end of the line had no need to spell out the consequences if immediate action was not taken. Harvard may be the premier university in the world but its standing depends on the continuing generosity of men such as Robert Belfer, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust in 1942 and made it to the top of the Enron corporation.
Now Belfer wanted to dissociate his family name from the holder of the Robert and Renee Belfer Chair of International Affairs at Harvard (Stephen Walt) who had dared to challenge the idea that it was in the best interests of the US to underwrite the policies of the Israeli government towards its Arab neighbours.
The device in question was a dry, academic paper on the website of the Harvard Working Papers written by Belfer's beneficiary and his Chicago collaborator, Prof John Mearsheimer. Within a day their paper had shot up the Google ratings and criss-crossed the world like a celebrity scandal. That two balding, middle-aged academics with a leaning towards the ponderous should find themselves media stars, feted and loathed in equal measure, was astonishing - not least to themselves and their colleagues. They had done the unthinkable for American academia. They had used the prestigious setting of Harvard to attack the link between Israel and America and to name the power that sustained it: the Israel lobby. Academic life was never meant to be so exciting.
The authors' paper was roundly denounced by colleagues and commentators from Texas to Israel for a variety of scholarly deficiencies which, decoded, hinted at the charge that dare not speak its name in professional circles - anti-Semitism. The British journalist Christopher Hitchens recoiled from his reading of the paper, declaring it to be "slightly but unmistakably smelly". One of Walt's colleagues at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz, called the authors "liars" and "bigots". Mearsheimer's fellow professor at Chicago, Daniel Drezner, dismissed their work as "piss-poor, monocausal social science".
But others on the left, and liberals within the Jewish community such as New York University historian Tony Judt, took heart and applauded the break with conformity and self-censorship. Now the paper has given way to a book by the same title. It has already become a best-seller in the United States and may well embolden more academics and publishers to break the taboo which has locked the fate of Israel into American politics since the 1960s.
The argument and structure of the book are essentially the same as the paper on which it is based, though the authors have made some important concessions of presentation and style.
Notably, Mearsheimer and Walt regret the impression given earlier that the Jewish influence was a cabal or conspiracy that controls American foreign policy through the powerful agency of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). They accept that Aipac is "simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles . . . [whose activities] are legitimate forms of democratic political participation". The book reduces the menacing capitalisation of "Lobby" in the original work; but the authors insist that their lower-case lobby still aims to have US leaders "treat Israel as if it were the 51st state".
The authors first address the central argument in support of Israel's privileged position. Why have Americans encouraged the growth of financial and diplomatic aid to Israel from the modest levels prior to 1967 to the annual $3 billion today? (That's $500 for every Israeli citizen compared to $20 each for the Egyptians and Pakistanis who are also central players on the US side of Middle East politics.)
THE USUAL DEFENCE of America's extraordinary generosity to Israel is the claim that Israel alone in this volatile region shares the moral values which define the United States and, secondly, that its military strength is a key strategic asset for America in the area. Neither proposition is true, the authors claim. Far from being a moral imperative for the US, Israel is today a moral liability. And far from being an asset, Israel today is a strategic liability, feeding the hatred that fuels Arab and Muslim perceptions of America throughout the world. But no one with aspirations to political power can say so.
This is not the consequence of ignorance. "The real reason why American politicians are so deferential is the political power of the Israel lobby". Democrats and Republicans alike fear the lobby's clout and take no risk above the parapet of media scrutiny. Clinton, Obama, Romney, McCain - they all line up to reassure the voters and donors and, above all, Aipac, that "we stand by our friend and our ally", in Hillary Clinton's words. As McCain put it: "when it comes to the defence of Israel, we simply cannot compromise".
Mearsheimer and Walt have written a challenging riposte to half a century of American capitulation to the power of the Israel lobby.
In a fascinating chapter on the composition of the lobby, they include the gentile contributions of the neoconservatives - now surely enshrined in the museum of lost causes - and the Christian Zionists, of whom Daniel Pipes said: "Other than the Israel Defence Forces, America's Christian Zionists may be the Jewish state's ultimate strategic asset."
Their influence on the lobby's monetary and electoral power is greater than the authors concede, though their organisational weakness may damage their impact on the next administration.
WHAT IS THE authors' remedy for the ills so trenchantly diagnosed in this courageous and provocative analysis? They note the fundamental need for the reform of campaign funding to disable the lobby's capacity for influence, but offer little hope that this nettle will ever be grasped by the political establishment. Transforming the moral climate which encourages Americans to buy into Israeli definitions of their security needs and ignore the plight of the Palestinians is hardly on the agenda of the next administration, but there is at least the prospect after that.
Perhaps the best hope is the evidence here in this book that two self-styled and hard-nosed realists, who have spent a lifetime decrying the significance of ethics and domestic politics in international affairs, have now at last reassessed the empirical evidence and become advocates of moral change. Morality can be a potent force in international affairs.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College DublinBill McSweeney
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy By John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt Allen Lane, 484pp. £25